DELLA VALLE, FAMILY. - An illustrious Roman house, whose earliest known member was a RUSTICO who was made a cardinal by Honorius II in 1219.
The family first had its houses near Trajan’s Forum and later, in the 15th century, moved to the Via Papale (now Corso Vittorio Emanuele), where the original palace, destroyed by the Landsknechts of Charles V during the Sack of Rome (1527), was rebuilt in its present form by Lorenzo Lotti, known as Lorenzetto.
The most distinguished members of this family are:
ANDREA, cardinal, born in Rome on 30 December 1463, died there on 3 August 1534. After traveling through Europe and Persia, he returned to Rome in 1495 and became bishop of Crotone (2 December 1496), then of Mileto (1508), and in this capacity participated in the Fifth Lateran Council (1512). Leo X appointed him regent of the Apostolic Chancery and later cardinal with the title of S. Agnese in Agone (1 July 1517). He held in commendam various abbeys and numerous bishoprics, sometimes simultaneously. Clement VII entrusted him with the legation to Naples (1523). During the Sack of Rome in 1527, although, according to family tradition, he sided with the Colonnas and the imperials, his palace was nevertheless sacked and he had to pay a large sum to ransom II.
In 1532, at the behest of Clement VII, he, together with Cardinal A. del Monte, reviewed the controversy between the Observant Franciscans and the Franciscan Hermits (Capuchins) (cf. Wadding, *Annales*, XVI, 11, p. 335). In April 1533 he was given the sees of Albano and Palestrina. He was a man of great wisdom and prudence, as well as a connoisseur and collector of antiquities.
PIETRO, traveler, born in Rome on 11 April 1586, died there on 21 April 1652. After literary and artistic studies in his youth, he left his city and, after brief voyages abroad, stayed in Naples until 1614, where he met M. Schipano, to whom he dedicated the 54 letters about his travels, rich in valuable information and used by geographers and other travelers.
On 8 June 1614 he set out from Venice on his long journey: after a stop at Zante and at what he believed to be the ruins of Troy, he reached Constantinople; from there to Alexandria and Cairo. He ascended Mount Sinai and from Suez went to Jerusalem (Easter 1616). Continuing to observe and record, he traveled on to Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, and Persia, visiting various cities there. In 1621 he was at Persepolis and was the first to describe its cuneiform inscriptions. He made his way into India, partly by coasting as far as Calcutta and partly by traveling inland as far as Gujarat. After other stops in Arabia, he returned to Rome on 28 March 1626, where he was received with great honors by Urban VIII.
Among other achievements, Della Valle copied the inscriptions of the mosque of at-Tajjibah (Syria); acquired many manuscripts that he left to the Vatican Library, where his apologetic epistle in Persian on the Catholic religion is preserved; he translated into Latin a catechism of the Shiites and into Persian the treatise of the former Jesuit C. Borri on Tycho Brahe’s system. — See plate LXXXIX.